Lord Jim | Page 3

halting-places was just Jim the water-clerk. Afterwards, when his
keen perception of the Intolerable drove him away for good from
seaports and white men, even into the virgin forest, the Malays of the
jungle village, where he had elected to conceal his deplorable faculty,
added a word to the monosyllable of his incognito. They called him
Tuan Jim: as one might say--Lord Jim.
Originally he came from a parsonage. Many commanders of fine
merchant-ships come from these abodes of piety and peace. Jim's father
possessed such certain knowledge of the Unknowable as made for the
righteousness of people in cottages without disturbing the ease of mind
of those whom an unerring Providence enables to live in mansions. The
little church on a hill had the mossy greyness of a rock seen through a
ragged screen of leaves. It had stood there for centuries, but the trees
around probably remembered the laying of the first stone. Below, the
red front of the rectory gleamed with a warm tint in the midst of
grass-plots, flower-beds, and fir-trees, with an orchard at the back, a
paved stable-yard to the left, and the sloping glass of greenhouses
tacked along a wall of bricks. The living had belonged to the family for
generations; but Jim was one of five sons, and when after a course of
light holiday literature his vocation for the sea had declared itself, he
was sent at once to a 'training-ship for officers of the mercantile
marine.'
He learned there a little trigonometry and how to cross top-gallant
yards. He was generally liked. He had the third place in navigation and
pulled stroke in the first cutter. Having a steady head with an excellent
physique, he was very smart aloft. His station was in the fore-top, and
often from there he looked down, with the contempt of a man destined
to shine in the midst of dangers, at the peaceful multitude of roofs cut

in two by the brown tide of the stream, while scattered on the outskirts
of the surrounding plain the factory chimneys rose perpendicular
against a grimy sky, each slender like a pencil, and belching out smoke
like a volcano. He could see the big ships departing, the broad-beamed
ferries constantly on the move, the little boats floating far below his
feet, with the hazy splendour of the sea in the distance, and the hope of
a stirring life in the world of adventure.
On the lower deck in the babel of two hundred voices he would forget
himself, and beforehand live in his mind the sea-life of light literature.
He saw himself saving people from sinking ships, cutting away masts
in a hurricane, swimming through a surf with a line; or as a lonely
castaway, barefooted and half naked, walking on uncovered reefs in
search of shellfish to stave off starvation. He confronted savages on
tropical shores, quelled mutinies on the high seas, and in a small boat
upon the ocean kept up the hearts of despairing men--always an
example of devotion to duty, and as unflinching as a hero in a book.
'Something's up. Come along.'
He leaped to his feet. The boys were streaming up the ladders. Above
could be heard a great scurrying about and shouting, and when he got
through the hatchway he stood still--as if confounded.
It was the dusk of a winter's day. The gale had freshened since noon,
stopping the traffic on the river, and now blew with the strength of a
hurricane in fitful bursts that boomed like salvoes of great guns firing
over the ocean. The rain slanted in sheets that flicked and subsided, and
between whiles Jim had threatening glimpses of the tumbling tide, the
small craft jumbled and tossing along the shore, the motionless
buildings in the driving mist, the broad ferry-boats pitching
ponderously at anchor, the vast landing-stages heaving up and down
and smothered in sprays. The next gust seemed to blow all this away.
The air was full of flying water. There was a fierce purpose in the gale,
a furious earnestness in the screech of the wind, in the brutal tumult of
earth and sky, that seemed directed at him, and made him hold his
breath in awe. He stood still. It seemed to him he was whirled around.

He was jostled. 'Man the cutter!' Boys rushed past him. A coaster
running in for shelter had crashed through a schooner at anchor, and
one of the ship's instructors had seen the accident. A mob of boys
clambered on the rails, clustered round the davits. 'Collision. Just ahead
of us. Mr. Symons saw it.' A push made him stagger against the
mizzen-mast, and he caught hold of a rope. The old training-ship
chained to her moorings quivered all over, bowing gently head to wind,
and with